Semantics and context matter. Width is a lovely word for things that have width, and meaningless if applied to things that don't. Consider “Set your emphasis

Semantics and context matter. Width is a lovely word for things that have width, and meaningless if applied to things that don't. Consider “Set your emphasis width to 12 points.” None of that is applicable even though there are 3 CSS keywords in there and you can make sense of the sentence. > Don't you want consistent appearance of the link both in colors and font-size, in the name of affordance? Speaking for me, no. All words in the sentence, both inside and outside the anchor, should be consistent font, but the anchor has both state and behavior that can include color, underline, etc., to set what's inside the anchor to be inconsistent from the surrounding text, for attention and information. Generally, font size is not one of those things that would vary (Mac dock icon mouseover as a counter-example). There's a decent chance much of this makes more sense if you were making sites before these capabilities were developed and were along for the progression. It likely does seem like a chaotic mess when picking it up for the first time in present state, so I think it's a fair reaction.